Roundup 09Feb10

09Feb10

1) Remember when they said airport scanner images could not be recorded and distributed?  Is this supposed to be corroboration?  From prisonplanet:

Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.

2) Suzan Cooke has some (I think important) thoughts on physical causes of transsexuality that people should have a read through if they haven’t already.

3) Another valuable read: Kelley Winters on the ongoing debate about stigmatization vs. the medical necessity treatment of GID.

4) Cuba leads the way, setting out a model that depathologizes transsexuality but maintains not only health care availability, but also funding.

5) APA recommendations regarding the revisions for the DSM-V are to be released on Feb. 10 (tomorrow).

6) Edit to add: More worthwhile reading at Feminste: On Identifying Identities

It takes some kind of extraordinary arrogance to declare an identity for someone else. This is an attitude that says, ‘My perceptions are more important than your lived experience.’

Filed under: activism, medical, transgender   |  1 Comment

20/20 Hindsight: the Much Ado About Nothing FoF Superbowl Ad

09Feb10

The word was that Tim Tebow and mom Pam were intending to speak out against abortion in a Focus on the Family -funded ad during one of the much-coveted Superbowl breaks. Well, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, here’s the nearly $3 million dollar spot.

Seems like much ado about nothing and a brilliant way for anti-abortionists to play victim to drum up sympathy, which is exactly what the pundits are saying this morning. Abortion was never mentioned in the ad, just a mom’s statement that the football star almost never made it into the world — and an invitation to go to the Focus website to learn more.

Never mind that in said website follow-up, Pam Tebow’s claim that she was advised by her doctors to have an abortion due to health issues conflicts with fact that abortion was illegal in the Philippines at the time. Never mind that Focus on the Family’s ultimate intent was to suggest that abortion is evil even if the mother’s life is at stake. Never mind that the end objective is still obviously to reopen the debate over womens’ bodies and rights, even if that wasn’t what appeared on the screen. Never mind that the ad as presented looks probably about as innocuous as the ad that CBS previously refused to run when the United Church wanted to announce that it was LGTB-affirming… an obvious double-standard. Never mind all that, because what the public sees is “rabid feminist lefties” screaming and shouting over something that’s perfectly innocent-looking — thereby validating the stereotypes of misguided militancy and themselves as victims that the religious right has been pushing all along.

I smell a bait and switch.

Filed under: Gender Politics, activism, feminism, media, politics, religion   |  1 Comment

“Moral”

20Jan10

“of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior… ethical… conforming to a standard of right behavior” — Merriam-Webster

After a search of several definitions, I still don’t know which church was given province over judging what is and isn’t moral.  I do, however, have a few thoughts about how the word should be applied.

It is not moral to tell a child they are an abomination simply because they exist.

It is not moral to characterize bullying and beating a child because of perceived orientation or gender expression as a reasonable growing experience.

It is not moral to seek to define sexuality in law in such a way that for someone who has had gender reassignment surgery, no permutation of sex whatsoever is legal.

It is not moral to spin legislation that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and transsexual people from employment and housing discrimination as a “pedophile protection act.”

It is not moral to flip “transgender” and “pedophile” around to the point of interchangability to give the impression that they’re the same thing.

It is not moral to grossly distort history to portray people who you don’t like (and who were in fact among the victims) as the architects of Nazi atrocities.

It is not moral to deliberately set drivers’ license policy so that it creates barriers for transsexuals in work, travel, living, citizenship and freedom from discrimination.

It is not moral to stand in front of high school students and say that “homosexuals should be executed.”

It is not moral to use the Bible as justification for murder.

It is not moral to call an earthquake that kills (at latest count) 70,000 people a “blessing in disguise” and blame it on an irrational and implausible deal with the devil.

It is not moral to throw a ministry that serves the poor and homeless under the bus because of a disagreement with churches who welcome LGBT people.

It is not moral to willfully distort scientific data to spin in such a way that it paints a group of people in a negative light.

It is not moral to rewrite political history and infuse it with divine genesis in order to reinforce and intermingle your personal beliefs about both.

It is not moral to push for peoples’ rights to be put to a vote.

It is not moral to deny people a right to marry and all the benefits conferred by that (i.e. health benefits, death mandates) by making an unquantifiable claim that it would hurt all other marriages to do so.

It is not moral to force a 14-year-old to have sex with a prostitute in order to ensure your child won’t be gay.

It is not moral to petition to pay a priest monthly benefits and living allowance after he’s been defrocked for the sexual abuse of at least 20 children and call that charity, while pushing a publicly-funded school board to fire a transitioning teacher because this violates the the teaching of the Catholic Church.

It is not moral to force people to choose between God and family.

It is not moral to lie outright in order to assassinate the character of political officials or appointees who are ideologically different from you.

It is not moral to deport someone for a technicality to a nation that will likely imprison them or worse just because of who they are.

It is not moral to campaign for separation of church and state in taxation, but at the same time push for legislation of Judeo-Christian “morality,” overthrow of non-Christian governments, or governmental discrimination according to church principles.

It is not moral to insist that funding to fight the HIV epidemic be refused to organizations that help sex workers even in the slightest ways.

It is not moral to seek to funnel foreign aid meant to be used to combat HIV into abstinence-only programs as a means of funding evangelism, and seek to disqualify the most at-risk groups from funding so as to eliminate the competition (see also comment on sex worker exclusion above).

It is not moral to petition governments to forcibly convert gays through disproven therapies.

It is not moral to rush to pass laws that would subject homosexuals to life imprisonment or even death (in several cases, including “repeat offenders”), 5-7 years for anyone who advocates in their defense, and 3 years to anyone who fails to report them.

It is not moral to hold lawmakers who propose legislation like this up as examples we want to follow or attitudes we want to bring to our country.

It is not moral to hold up Uganda’s proposed death penalty up as the right thing to do in Western society and condemn those who condemn the genocide.

It is not moral to do these things in the name of someone who said his commandment was that “you love one another.”

It is not moral to elevate those who do to the level of being keepers of the faith and the leaders to obey.

And while I do not believe that most Christians support the extremes of these examples, it will not be moral for them to sit idly by and allow these attitudes and extremes to go unchallenged.

“Moral” — it’s one of those words that needs to be reclaimed, because it has become warped and twisted under the Fundamentalists’ watch.

Filed under: Canada, hate, politics, religion   |  5 Comments

The Autogynephile Tribe

19Jan10

Blogger Jack Molay has been putting forward a self-driven examination of Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia, as someone who identifies as autogynephile.

I put this shout-out not as an endorsement, nor as a condemnation.  Personally, I loathe AGP because of how it has been used and the assumptions at the core of its genesis, but that’s based on my experiences, and not Molay’s words.  As I’ve said before, we have a responsibility to allow others to self-define, and I support that up to but not including where that self-definition seeks to define others.  Blanchard’s “Autogynephilia” does seek to miscategorize people, specifically transsexuals… however, I do believe from reading this blog that this author does not share that aim.

I will offer a little advice, however: Autogynephilia is still being championed by its creator, who is in a position to entrench it in the DSM, which may occur in 2013.  It is quite likely that if this occurs, like it or not, AGP will be defined on Blanchard’s terms (at least in clinical settings), not Molay’s, as the former is both originator and medical administrator.  This means that your self-definition will be undermined by whatever paraphilial suppositions emerge.  The AGP clinical model by its very nature as an intended paraphilic classification carries certain implications that I suspect will run counter and counterproductive to what Molay is hoping to achieve.

I won’t suggest making a new term, because FCS we’ve got so many already and every one of them has as many definitions as there are supporters and detractors of each.  I bloody hate labels.  Redefine AGP?  You can try, but just be aware of what you’re up against, and that you will necessarily be painted by Blanchard’s brush to some degree by accepting the term — and it will affect how others respond to your efforts.

Filed under: medical, transgender   |  1 Comment

Archive: 3 Models of Transsexuality

19Jan10

(The following archives an article from May 2008.  Some of my thinking has since changed, and this will not reflect this.)

Filed under: medical, transgender   |  Leave a Comment

Freedom and Loathing in Alberta

18Jan10

The death threats keep coming in for Darren Lund, a University of Calgary professor.

“I was raised in a traditional Lutheran church, and the message from Jesus was accepting all those that society rejects — the lepers and prostitutes,” he said. “The message was all about love and kindness.” (Source: Cochrane Eagle)

Yet, that message is missing from the screeds that use Biblical doctrine to assert phrases like “watch your back,” “Hell awaits all homosexuals,” “death to homosexuals,” and “death to Darren Lund.”

Lund, a married father of two who doesn’t identify as gay, nonetheless became a community ally when he was a high school teacher in Red Deer, Alberta and helped students form the Province’s first high school Gay-Straight Alliance.  He first came to notice in the media in 2002, when he filed a human rights complaint objecting to the publication of a letter that he felt spread hatred toward LGBT people and likely fostered the sentiment that led to the beating of a youth in the weeks that followed.

The Red Deer Advocate published the letter written by the Rev. Stephen Boissoin, then executive director of the Concerned Christian Coalition.  In it, Boissoin called gay people “as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities” and suggested that society needed to rid itself of them.

Lund felt Boissoin’s statements were likely to expose LGBT people to hatred and contemptand were implicated in an incident of violence.  The Alberta Human Rights Commission agreed in a 2007 ruling, but this was overturned in late 2009 by the Court of Queen’s Bench.  He is still mulling over whether to appeal.

It should be mentioned that nobody ever considered the complaint a clear-cut case, and it relies on a value judgment on how much hate is needed to be legally considered hate. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, never explicitly called for genocide, yet foster an environment in which a violent expression of hatred of Jews becomes likely — Boissoin’s letter trod a similarly grey area. Canadian LGBT organization Egale Canada surprised many by opposing the original conviction, saying in 2005 that “it is far better that Boissoin expose his views than have them pushed underground. Under the glaring light of public scrutiny, his ideas will most likely wither and die.” We can only hope they’re right.

Still, the fact that it was overturned hasn’t stopped the far right from citing the original case as confirmation that hate crimes laws somehow criminalize Christianity.  It also hasn’t stopped the threats from coming in, postmarked from Cochrane, Alberta, a town 22 km from Calgary (roughly about 13 1/2 miles).

“You expect some resistance and healthy debate on these issues. People aren’t all going to agree on sexual orientation. . . . But they are trying to use methods to intimidate and silence me.”

The latest envelope given to Calgary police yielded a fingerprint.

(Also offered to Pam’s House Blend. h/t to M. at Slap)

Filed under: Alberta, Canada, activism, hate, media   |  1 Comment

Risky Thinking: The Implications of Sex and Gender Minority Advocacy

08Jan10

(My apologies for self-quoting so much here, but this article brings together some threads made before, and therefore need to be linked)

We’re experiencing an interesting moment, even if it sometimes brings heavier negative $#!t than we’ve ever expected.  As a transsexual during the societal coming-out of transsexuality, it’s kind of one of those rare glimpses within the split second of the rite of passage from obscurity to awareness.  Of course, it’s longer than a split second relative to our own lives — gays and lesbians made this transition in the early 1970s and are still not completely past the repercussive effect — but it’s still a moment on the cusp of a revolution, where we can look forward at those who trod the path toward acceptance, and then back at those who hide in the shadows, wishing to follow.

At this moment, several different subcommunities are self-defining to the point of excluding others, sometimes vilifying and refusing to associate with them, all in the name of determining their own identity.  We’ve seen it before, I detailed a lot of how the transsexual vs. transgender rifts forming mimic the self-defining-to-exclusion that occurred in other minority groups in “Rocky Horror and the Holy Grail” and won’t reopen that here.  But one thing I’ve kept hearing is about how trans is the “last great unprotected minority” and that kind of thinking boggles my mind.  Because in stepping back and looking at this from a perspective of sex and gender minorities, it seems to me that we are only just starting to come out.  And if we can’t learn from those previous mistakes, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past in a tragic way.

Filed under: BDSM / leather, Gender Politics, activism, feminism, fetish, sex-positive, transgender   |  2 Comments

Beautiful Blogger

06Jan10

Helen Boyd at en|gender surprised me with a nomination as a Beautiful Blogger.

It’s an honour to be selected.  Thank you!

As outlined there are responsibilities that come with this honour:

1. thank the person who chose you.
2. link to her site.
3. put award on blog.
4. enumerate 7 interesting things about myself.
5. choose 7 other people to be Beautiful Bloggers.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  2 Comments

Roundup January 3rd

03Jan10

I keep seeing a lot of news go by that I really don’t have any chance to comment on.  I don’t know if this will be a regular thing, but I wanted to discuss a few happenings of late:

Filed under: Alberta, Canada, activism, feminism, media, sex-positive, transgender   |  1 Comment

Important Action Alert: Bill C-389 Gender Identity and Gender Expression Protections

01Jan10

(In conjunction with January issue, GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine)

As 2010 gets underway, Bill Siksay’s private member’s bill C-389¹ will be coming up for discussion to add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of protected classes in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code of Canada.

This bill is something the GLBT community as a whole should be aware of, and get involved in working toward its passage — it more important than people realize.

Filed under: Canada, activism, feminism, politics, transgender   |  7 Comments